Monday, February 03, 2014

JavaScript: the one true language

The thing about JavaScript is this. It was created back in the late 1990s as a non-serious scripting language, as the little cousin to "real" languages like Java. But something strange happened, it grew up to become a real programming language. It's now the preferred language for writing apps in the browser, overtaking Java. It's also a great server-side language. JSON, meaning data structures formatted in JavaScript, is replacing XML as the standard interchange format -- even when neither side is written in JavaScript.

JavaScript is the one language you can't avoid. No matter how much you hate the language, no matter how much you prefer a different language, you are going to end up dealing with JavaScript in some form.

Thus, instead of resisting the change, you have to come up to speed on it. The above Mozilla document is excellent at this. It doesn't waste time with concepts you already know. Instead, it assumes you are already a competent programmer in some language, and that you already have a familiarity with JavaScript, and then targets the meat of the matter.